Bloop!

A couple of posts back I listed a bunch of mysterious sounds recorded by the NOAA in the world's oceans. I’d like to focus in on one of them a little more closely: the mysterious “Bloop” -- one of six recorded sounds that the NOAA has made public. The mystery sounds were recorded by an array of underwater sound sensors originally set up to track Soviet subs -- but they picked up plenty of other sounds, too, like whales and earthquakes. They also picked up a few sounds that are unidentified -- sounds like the “Bloop”, which you can hear (sped up to 16x speed) by clicking on this link.

So what’s so special about the mysterious Bloop? Three things:

1. It’s alive! Everyone -- every article -- agrees that it is biological in origin! ^[1]

2. It’s the biggest animal on Earth! Even a blue whale can't bloop so loud!

3. And nobody knows what it is!

That’s so cool that I’m going to repeat myself: The biggest animal on the planet is out there in the depths of the oceans, and nobody knows what the hell it is! Some have speculated that it is a giant squid, but CNN quotes marine biologist Phil Lobel from Boston University, whose specialties include “fish bioacoustics”, as saying, "Cephalopods have no gas-filled sac, so they have no way to make that type of noise".

We love a beautiful mystery, and this, folks, is a big one…

Amazingly, however, I stumbled across the answer to this mystery while reading comics with my kids on the very day that I drafted this here post. According to Namor,^[2] "The largest living thing in all the world [is] ... Giganto!" Check it out, and quake in your boots, humanity:







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Footnotes:

^[1] Except for a few that don't. Bah. That guy probably gets his jollies from telling kids why there ain't no Santa. Probably tells widows there ain't no god, too.

^[2] See page 15 of The Fantastic Four, Volume 1 # 4 (page 93 of the 2005 Omnibus), drawn by King Kirby!